Chapter 2
Dr Weiss, Director of Eastern Power, was a very annoyed man, and his annoyance was evident in his voice as he spoke.
“You mean to say that while these surges disturb you, they didn’t seem urgent enough for you to by-pass me and see for yourself, what, if anything, is wrong?”
“Not yet sir. I thought I’d be right for me to consult you before I went snooping around the reactor systems, particularly the AI.”
“Hmm… let’s see, the report mentions a few surges in processing power being used, lasting for a few seconds, hardly the end of the world now is it?”
Staring at the man sitting before him, Weiss could see the discontentment stirring in him. He was good at hiding it, but not that good.
Letting out a sigh, he said “You really want to know what’s happening during those few seconds, right?”
“Yes sir, after all for such powerful AI’s, a few seconds could well be worth more than a few hours, maybe even days or weeks—“
“I know that! Spare me all the technical details. I’m not the total ignoramus I appear to be.”
Turning red with embarrassment, “Sir I –“
“I know Sebastian, I know. Now why don’t you scurry along and ask them about it? There’s no need to waste my time like this. After all, the Ai’s aren’t out of bounds; not to you at any rate.”
The man, Sebastian, nodded
“I’ll take your leave then sir”
And he stepped out of the room, leaving the Director alone with his thoughts.
Having attained the peace and quiet he'd been wanting at last, the director just shook his head. A bright lad that one; he’ll do extremely well… if only he didn’t worry so much. Letting out a sigh, he turned once more to the pile of sundry drafts and reports awaiting his appraisal.
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Drifting through the void of space with its precious cargo, the Lonely Wanderer, a mid-class freighter, aligned itself with the next jump station, and slowly accelerated.
“How much time in reaching the point Yarwin?”
“About twenty minutes skip”
“Hmmm, good.” replied Captain Aanya, as she glared distastefully at the alien behemoth that now loomed before her ship.
Wide, enough to swallow planetoids, the jump points, gigantic hollow, spherical constructions, drifted in space like miniature suns, waiting to swallow the unwary, a picture that wasn’t helped at all by the glowing silver globe of energy flickering within.
Alien technology, somehow cannibalised by human science to make jumps between systems shorter, these jump stations were said to be part of a large winding network of interconnected ‘expressways’, as someone had described them, pathways closely resembling the wormholes that had been the staple diet of science fiction writers of the early Earth years, yet still so very different from them.
It was said that these pathways extended all over the galaxy and even beyond into the Magellanic Clouds and even up till the Andromeda galaxy. Some even believed that they originated in the Andromeda and arrived here later as their creators, the ‘Elders’, as some called them, expanded their borders, spreading across galaxies. But this was all conjecture. No one knew for sure, and no one was going to find out, not anytime soon at any rate.
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Exodus
Science FictionSummary: Left a damaged husk, a pale shadow of all it once was by the last war, Earth, the cradle of our civilization is now populated by only a few million, living among the ruins of our former glories. As support and aid pours in from the colonies...
